Comments
We are proud to have one of the richest, most intelligent comments sections of any economics and policy blog. As our readership gets larger and new people join the discussion, however, we have to have a few rules:
1. No profanity.
2. No attacks or insults aimed at other commenters. Calling a public official an idiot is one thing; calling someone who just wrote a comment an idiot is another.
3. No attacks or insults aimed at entire categories of people based on race, gender, religion, national origin or identity, or something similar.
4. No “replying” to the first post in a long stream simply to put your post at the top. Only use “reply” if you are replying to the substance of the earlier post.
5. No using multiple identities to agree with yourself and attack other people.
6. Comments must be relevant to the discussion in some way, and must be in English so that other people reading the blog can read them.
If I see comments falling into these categories, I will delete them. If the same person persists in violating these policies, I will do what I can to block him or her. I am also adding filters on a few words to flag comments for moderation. I expect most of those comments will be approved. For example, if you use the word “moronic,” I just want to check that you are referring to, say, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, not a previous comment.
Also note that we use a spam filter which recently has been trapping about one legitimate comment per day as spam. I check about once per day and rescue any legitimate comments I find in the filter.
